Natural immunity is 13 times stronger than what we get from the vaccines, according to data from Israel.

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.08.24.21262415v...

We probably didn’t even need to waste vaccines on people who had already recovered.

I agree with your last statement, but that is 20/20 hindsight.

The media played up reinfections tremendously last year and even though there was no data, I think it impacted politicians/public health policy makers to err on the side of caution.

The interesting thing is the vaccine was never tested in previously infected individuals and that could have been a contraindication for vaccination.

As a horror writer I cannot help but imagine moralizing scenarios where in the west, we vaccinate and lockdown and hoard vaccine and have immunity from vaccines, while in the Global South and places forced to reach herd immunity are realized to be immune to all variants while we must race to make and inject ourselves with boosters against each new variant. A variant arrives that is even more deadly and it wipes us out while the Global South survives better and ascends. I'm always writing stories!

> I’m worried that my immunity is weaker

It is my understanding the effect is additive. The vaccine shows your immune system a small but important part of the virus so your immune system knows to respond to those particular proteins in the future. A natural infection exposes you to more proteins, so your body also recognizes those as dangerous.

From what I have learned over the past months wrt variants and vaccine efficacy, the delta variant has a mutated spike protein which allows it to more easily and I believe more quickly bind to host cells and begin inserting its genetic information.

I understand that the spike protein is the most saturated target of the known immunological study, vaccines have been mainly targeting this protein. Normal immunity works on the current variant of infection and will react to these mutations.

As an aside, the protein is very interesting, check out this[0] linked animation of the viral insertion, note the dramatic conformal changes.

The mutations in particular variants might achieve a little bit of infection speed, and a little immunological camouflage, both seem to support allowing faster replication.

I don't know because I am not a doctor or virologist, but I would conjecture that the vaccine still prepares our immune responses to target this kind of protein, so it can somewhat more easily learn the new signature and produce antibodies.

[0] length: 01:54 title: Animation of SARS-CoV-2 entry into human host-cell - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xuc9D4LVJdg

You're fine, you got a complimentary booster shot early. On average the best immunity is recovered and vaccinated one way or the other, so you may be better off than your wife now. Vaccine breakthroughs were expected so there's nothing wrong with you.

Dumb people are going to want to go to covid parties to get infected naturally because it is better immunity..

Public health messages need to be kept simple.

Natural immunity should be better because you are exposed to all the same proteins in the vaccine plus more and also possibly for a longer period of time and at a higher quantity.

Now that you had delta, you should be immune to delta and partially immune to whatever delta mutates into.

> Dumb people are going to want to go to covid parties

When I was a child, parents would inform other parents when a child had chickenpox; so they could have a sleepover. That was normal practice in the portion of the USA I grew up in. As a result, nearly everyone my age has natural immunity to chickenpox.

I share that anecdote to point out that the idea of an "infection party" is a really old idea that was practiced at scale. It's not unreasonable to assume people will treat this the same way based on that type of past behavior. Whether it's "dumb" or not remains to be seen.

Edit: I wanted to add for younger persons a blurb about WHY you want to get chickenpox as a kid. Children experience mild symptoms from chickenpox - it's a non-event other than missing some school and having a few sores. Adult cases of chicken pox however are fatal by a large majority.

Adult cases are not fatal by a large majority. The highest number I could find said that adults were 25 times more likely to die from chickenpox than children.

I found a death rate of 21 per 100000 adult cases. That's not a majority. [0]

Also, it's better to never get chickenpox at all, as shingles is very painful. Shingles is the reactivation of the chickenpox virus. If you've ever had chickenpox, you are at risk of shingles.

[0]: https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/pubs/pinkbook/varicella.html

Now in 2021 we are going to force kids to interact with their peers with a facemask on to make sure they never get to build a competent immune system.

I’m with you on this. I think kids getting it is the key to us getting out of the cycle.

Despite media hysteria, the risk to children is extremely low. So low that the UK isn’t going to vaccinate most kids at all.

https://www.newsweek.com/uk-wont-vaccinate-most-children-tee...

Please do explain exactly how will kids get us out of the cycle?

They'll develop robust natural immunity with negligible risk, then grow up and become adults with robust natural immunity.

I think your logic is wrong.

There's still kids eating and playing in the dirt and there's still outside of school interactions going on. Plenty of kids not washing hands.

Wearing masks in school reduces the severity of an outbreak so that hospitals do not get overwhelmed. After all kids can get vaccinated that will help reduce hospitalizations too.

Right - but now there's a chickenpox vaccine, so you don't need to subject kids to the misery that is an actual case of chickenpox or to the rare outcomes where it's fatal or permanently disfiguring.

How fortunate are we now that within two years of Covid emerging, we have a similar vaccine that can prevent nearly all the suffering?

chickenpox has a death rate of .001%

Covid has a death rate of .5% (higher for older people, lower for younger)

flu has a death rate of .1% and you dont see people having flu parties..

> Covid has a death rate of .5% (higher for older people, lower for younger)

That is a very bold statement, given that mild cases are less likely to be recorded in official data sets, affecting the denominator much more for younger people than older people.

What we do know is that a total of 412 people between the ages 0-17 are known to have died from Covid19 in the U.S. since January 1, 2020. Total deaths from all causes in that age group was 55,352 for the same period and the total number of Covid19 deaths in the U.S. for the same period was 643,858. Out of that 502,863 were among those older than 65 years of age.

If we take your claimed death rate of 0.5% at face value, 412 deaths implies 82,400 infections. According to the U.S. Census Bureau[2], there are about 74 million people under the age of 18 in the U.S.

So, the assumption of 0.5% IFR implies that only 0.11% of those under the age of 18 got infected with Covid19 in the same time period.

Therefore, either the 0.5% IFR overestimates the actual IFR by about 500-600%, or Covid19 is just not that infectious among those younger than 18.

I am going to with the assumption that 0.5% IFR is way too high. In that case, it makes absolute sense not to disrupt the lives of young children to the extent we have already disrupted and allow them to gain natural immunity through each wave.

[1]: https://data.cdc.gov/NCHS/Provisional-COVID-19-Deaths-by-Sex...

[2]: https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/US/PST045219

I agree the death rate for children under 12 is probably very low. It could be as low as .01%.

I specifically wrote the rate is lower for younger people.

We will get a better idea of the death rate in children under 12 this year. As far as I know it is still holding very low.

> I specifically wrote the rate is lower for younger people.

Exactly. The question is how much lower. If, as it seems, it is low enough compared to all the other things that might harm a child, it would be rational to introduce them to the actual virus early and often.

Same has been common in other parts of the world.

> Public health messages need to be kept simple.

By simple you mean, dishonest?

People aren't as dumb as our betters believe. They pick up on obvious lies ("stop buying masks" => "everyone must wear a mask"), dishonesty ("ivermectin is for animals") and inconsistencies that fly in the face of intuition ("even if you had covid you still need the vaccination").

If the powers that be would stop trying to "shape human behavior" through lying we wouldn't see nearly the same level of vaccine hesitance and alternative medicine we do right now.

I agree that the public health messaging has quite a number of statements that may not be true. But they may not be false either. Instead of lies, scientists are erring on the side of caution for what they do know.

I agree that sanctimonious public health and politicians have created a lot of distrust. Their messaging is condescending, manipulative, and generates the direct opposite of what they are trying to achieve.

There can be honesty even if they are playing it safe: Just state plainly that the data is inconclusive, things are moving quickly and this is the best estimation they currently have. Spewing out patronizing misinformation (see the FDA's sassy "You are not a horse" tweet) is counter-productive.

And this is exactly the kind of reasoning that leads smart people to distrust public health messages.

"Public health messages need to be kept simple." is something I almost agree with. The problem comes is when the simplicity starts leaving things out and edges into "not the full truth," at which point people can identify that you have -- perhaps not intentionally -- deceived them. That lowers trust.

This current pandemic is an excellent example of what happens when you have lowered trust.

> Dumb people

How did we get to the point where we have to act like other humans are mentally inferior/incapable just for experiencing reality in their own unique way if it differs from our own?

e: me irl https://i.imgur.com/is5pp8k.gif

in the olden days dumb people just died and didnt reproduce. We have overcome a lot of natural selection so there are likely many more dumb people than in the past.

We all share the same reality that you have a .5% chance of dying from covid. If you choose not to take lifesaving vaccinations then you are dumb, especially if you are in a high risk category where the risk of death is 1-5%

Im not at all in favor of mandatory vaccinations.

> olden days dumb people just died and didnt reproduce.

It seems like this is not an internally consistent statement.

If "dumbness" is genetic and smart people make smart offspring and dumb people make dumb offspring, where do today's dumb people come from? Clearly, not the dumb people who died and did not reproduce.

The correct statement is that people who were not well adapted to their environment died. Some of them actually died after reproducing.

> same reality that you have a .5% chance of dying from covid.

One, "known" averages and individualized "probabilities" are different things.

Two, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28460412

Now you are confounding the probability of a random infected person dying with the probability of a randomly picked person in your own demographic group dying from Covid19.

For example, 3,145 females between 30-39 years of age died from Covid19 between 01/01/2020-09/04/2021. It looks like there are about 22 million people in that age group which corresponds to 0.014% probability of a randomly picked person in that group dying from Covid19 within that period.

[1]: https://data.cdc.gov/NCHS/Provisional-COVID-19-Deaths-by-Sex...

Why do we have to be so mean about it though? All the ableist language we throw around really saddens me https://campbellmgold.co.uk/archive_esoteric/morons_imbecile...

I think it is because we have a political structure that people to be increasingly accountable to the choices of others responsible for their mistakes. It breeds resentment and hatred.

Absent this structure, people would have no problem with an idiot making mistakes. Take that same person and make others pay for every mistake they make, and guess how people will respond.

> Natural immunity should be better because you are exposed to all the same proteins in the vaccine plus more

This directly contradicts what immunologists seem to be finding as in the "Antibodies elicited by mRNA-1273 vaccination bind more broadly to the receptor binding domain than do those from SARS-CoV-2 infection" [1] study.

Summarized by the director of the NIH [2]:

> antibodies elicited by the mRNA vaccine were more focused to the RBD compared to antibodies elicited by an infection, which more often targeted other portions of the spike protein. Importantly, the vaccine-elicited antibodies targeted a broader range of places on the RBD than those elicited by natural infection.

If there's one thing we should learn from this pandemic it seems like the complexity and non-intuitiveness of the immune system is amongst them.

1: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34103407/

2: https://directorsblog.nih.gov/2021/06/22/how-immunity-genera...

Early epidemiology is showing better immunity from natural infection.

A receptor binding domain is the place the on the virus that the virus uses to bind to cells.

However antibodies can bind to any part of the virus causing the virus particles to be attacked by the immune system. It is good to bind to the receptor binding domain, but it is good to bind to other parts of the virus too.

As the virus mutates, having antibodies that react to as much of the virus as possible is better than only having antibodies targeted towards the RBD

Preliminary data from Israel suggests that immunity acquired through natural infection may be more robust to variants like delta, compared to vaccine induced immunity. See this preprint and discussion from a couple weeks ago [1].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28307224

That's kind of beside the point. With natural infection, the risk of severe illness is also much higher. So for most people trying to get "better" immunity by natural infection is not a good tradeoff. It's kind of like saying that since it's extremely rare to get bitten by a shark twice, you should try to get a shark to bite you once in order to acquire "immunity" to sharks.

A lot of vaccine hesitancy (in the US at least) is driven by refusal to acknowledge natural immunity. Ignoring it is another "noblie lie" to help drive up vaccine numbers. It's much easier to say "just get the vaccine".

However, it's a massive ethical violation if the vaccine provides no improvement over natural immunity. It's still pretty bad if it only provides minimal improvement. "Just get the vaccine" would be an ok policy if there was a 0% chance of negative effects from the vaccine, but that is not true.

Ive suspected all along the massive media push that "natural infection only generates immunity for 90 days" or "6 months" or whatever would turn out to be false. The media played up anecdotes of reinfections but there was never any actual data.

The thing is they never lied. At the time they made those statements the virus had only been studied for that long.

By the time the vaccines were created the "reinfection" idea was entrenched (even though not proven) and the vaccine was recommended just in case.

I think far more vaccine hesitancy in the US is driven by glorifying "natural immunity", especially when it's not clearly stated whether it's pre- or post-COVID immunity that's being touted. For example, I can't tell from your comment whether your position is that people shouldn't get vaccinated at all or whether they shouldn't do so if they've already had COVID. The latter position is debatable, but the former would be firmly contrary to pretty much all known scientific evidence (as long as we're talking about the general population and not a specific subgroup).

What kind of decisions would you make with that information?

If you got the vaccine and then got the disease, be happy, you've just acquired natural immunity on the easy way.

I think the reason why it's so easy to spread misinformation (not just about COVID vaccines) is that there's just too many facts out there. It's easy to cherry pick facts without context to support any conclusion whatsoever. Another comment in this thread points out that vaccination typically gives 10,000-100,000 times the antibody needed to fight an infection. So the 5.7-fold vs 8-fold difference is fairly meaningless in the proper context, but it can create doubts wholly disproportionate to its significance.

"Natural immunity is better" is a very misleading and dangerous statement. Many people take it to mean that their natural immunity is better even if they have never had a covid infection before. Many people, including young and recently healthy people are currently painfully and tragically dying in overcrowded hospitals because they believed that. Some especially misguided people have tried to get the virus intentionally so that they can get this much ballyhooed "natural immunity". The results have been predictably disastrous.

Yes, once you have had the virus and are lucky enough to survive and recover, the natural immunity thus obtained is better. For several months. Then after about 6-9 months (afaik, check the cdc site for the exact period) your natural immunity wears out and you are better off getting a vaccine. But if you haven't had the virus, your natural immunity is not very good at protecting against it (that is why millions of people around the world have already died), and it is a very dangerous risk to take.

My cousin had covid and long covid after it. She got covid before vaccines were available. She got the vaccine as soon as recommended by doctors for people that have suffered from covid. She really did not want to repeat that experience.

States whose politicians have been talking up natural immunity are very hard hit. Hospitals throughout the south are overcrowded. There is a country wide shortage of oxygen, which may soon start resulting in more deaths. This is a very bad time to to talk up misleading notions of "natural immunity."